Usage of Target Groups 

To enable selective marketing, you classify your business partners into different target groups on the basis of certain shared marketing-relevant attributes (for example: age, occupation, hobbies, income and so on). You can then tailor your marketing activities to the requirements of these different groups. 

The following graphic illustrates how target groups are used within the SAP CRM System.

The graphic illustrates that target groups play a central role in both generating lists of business partners for the scenarios listed and in being one of the bases for cross-selling functions like top n product lists and product association rules. 

Type of action

When you create a product association rule for cross-selling or up-selling, you can define it per target group or profile. 

Similarly, top n product lists from the Business Information Warehouse (BW) are created by evaluating the sales figures for products purchased by a given target group. 

This means that the product recommendations business partners receive can depend not just on the product selected, but also on the target group to which they are assigned. To keep target group information in the BW System up-to-date, CRM and BW must be synchronized. You activate this synchronization by choosing the Synchronization with BW indicator from the properties of the target group.  For more information, see the BW documentation under Business Content   ® Customer Relationship Management ® Marketing ® Data Sources ® Data Source for Synchronization of Target Groups in BW and Business Content  ® Customer Relationship Management ® Marketing ® Marketing and Campaign Analysis ® ODS Objects ® Target Group: Business Partner List.

Application

·        Outbound

Within Campaign Management, target groups can be assigned to a marketing activity, as represented by a marketing plan element or campaign element in the CRM Marketing Planner. When you execute the activity, the list of business partners in the target group is forwarded to the relevant scenario.

In addition, you can specify whether activities are to be generated for the business partners.

- Telesales

Within a marketing campaign, you may wish to contact particular groups of business partners by telephone.  These business partners can be included in a target group and the list of business partners transferred to the Telesales application for processing.  Depending on the product or service selected, the Telesales agent is able to make product recommendations based on top n products lists and/or cross-selling rules.

 - Personalized Mail

Within a marketing campaign, you may wish to contact particular groups of business partners by mail (fax, SMS, E-mail, or letter).  These business partners can be included in a target group and the list of business partners passed on to the Mail application for further processing. In the case of E-mail, you are able to include links to Web sites and monitor whether or not the recipients branched to these sites.

·        Inbound

 - Internet Sales

For all business partners assigned to a target group, a top n list of recommended products can be displayed. Some or all of these products may be determined from the Business Information Warehouse, others may be maintained manually. On the interface itself, products from both lists are mixed and presented together.  The information business partners provide when maintaining their marketing profile in the Web shop is used to assign business partners to existing target groups or to create new groups.